The best approach to Perl 6 is to ignore it. I wasted some time on it 10 years ago, but eventually realized that it was (and still is) a farce. Perl, Python, and Ruby were successful because their creators were good coders with clear goals, who shipped useful programs. Perl 6 is not like this.

:( they're two different languages. There is nothing wrong with ignoring it, but those of us who know what Perl 6 is and what it will become are helping to make it better because it is something we need and nothing else provides.

It makes me sad that you'd tell someone to ignore making contributions to science :(

"Science"? On the one hand, thanks to the publish-or-perish research economy, lots of "science" is, like Perl 6, BS and hype. On the other, one of Perl 6's biggest failings is its utter ignorance of prior work, something "science" still respects.

Bud Lite was terrible beer ten years ago; reasonable people assume that it is still terrible. In any case, useful programming languages usually come from single designers/implementors with clear visions: Ritchie and C, Stroustrup and C++, Wall and Perl, van Rossum and Python, Matzumoto and Ruby. The others come from massive corporate money: Microsoft and C#, Sun and Java.

I won't defend the machine that goes *ping*, but I do believe there's actually more hype and less usefulness in Ruby than in C#. Now the first version of C# was way too conservative (so as not to surprise and frighten the old-school C/C++ programmers), but the current version with generics, lambdas and type inference is pretty nice.